Friday 21 Getting soap, underwear, toothpaste, diapers, and other basics to local shelters for the homeless is the idea behind the collection drive that continues today under the auspices of the five-year-old Homeless Helpline. Bring your donations (new items only) to any of the following locations : University of Illinois at Chicago Agape House, 1046 […]
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 32
Issue of May. 20 – 26, 1993
Posted inArts & Culture
Black Snow
BLACK SNOW Goodman Theatre Black Snow opens as Sergei Maxudov, a poor young writer who despairs of being published, pins a suicide note to his coat and mounts a chair to hang himself. But he can’t quite get his neck in the rope. He grabs his huge unpublished manuscript and plops it on the chair. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
David Murray & Kahil El’Zabar
At this point in his not-so-long but oh-so-controversial career, tenor saxophonist David Murray invites you to pick and choose. The most widely recorded jazzman of his generation, Murray appears on CDs with his big band and octet, as guest soloist with other big bands, with the World Saxophone Quartet (which he cofounded), and with a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lend Me a Tenor
The setting of Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor is the mid-1930s–the era in which a cute, raffish teenager named Mickey Rooney was lighting up the screen as Huck, Puck, and Andy Hardy. Today Rooney’s a roly-poly, red-faced old clown, well suited to the starring role in this screwball comedy about a regional opera impresario […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Blackmail
Contrary to what’s suggested in the Film Center’s Gazette, the version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 masterpiece being shown is not his first sound picture, but the film that immediately preceded it, his last silent. (Both versions follow the plight of a murderer caught between her blackmailer and her boyfriend, an investigating detective.) For all the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Man adopts school: Jess Levine and the East Village Youth Program
The story in the Tribune changed Jess Levine’s life. It was a Chicagoland feature about William Kellogg, a businessman from Wilmette who spent a few hours a week leading a class in literature for inner-city kids. “I was a 40-year-old jeweler when I read that article and I was starting to wonder whether there was […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Joan Morris and William Bolcom
William Bolcom is one of the privileged members of the American music establishment, with a Pulitzer Prize under his belt and plenty of commissions in his crowded calendar (especially after the succes d’estime of his opera McTeague, which was premiered by the Lyric last fall). Joan Morris, his wife, is a gifted mezzo-soprano with an […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Understanding Business
I was handicapped from the start. Familiar jolts of pain shot through my cramped hands as they remembered years spent pecking away at keyboards. Mia, at age 14, was the perfect height for the machine. Though she couldn’t type her own name too quickly, being a Nintendo expert she was accustomed to the video-game style […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Dance Notes: Sarah Petronio’s musical feet
On a hot day in early May a group of Columbia College art students are hanging out in front of the school to catch some rays as the sun beats down, warming the sidewalks and parking lots of South Wabash. In the college’s dim cafeteria, less than a hundred yards away, Sarah Petronio is tap-dancing. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
Lenny Wilkens, head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, stepped to the podium, sat down in front of the microphones, and looked around at the assembled members of the media. With that ever-startling New York accent of his–part gym rat, part Billy Crystal–he said, “I’m glad all of you showed up.” He then began to try […]
Posted inArts & Culture
WBEZ’s Arts Commitment: More Coverage, Less Artistic License/Magritte’s Not Cheap
WBEZ has curtailed Victoria Lautman’s Artistic License and moved it to Friday afternoons. “We had a devoted following on Saturday,” she says, “but it was not as large as we would have liked.”
Posted inArts & Culture
Red Devil Green Devil/The Blacksmith and His Three Wishes
RED DEVIL GREEN DEVIL Redmoon Theatre at the Organic Theater Company THE BLACKSMITH AND HIS THREE WISHES Terrapin Theatre Company at the Garage Red Devil Green Devil owes a debt to the grotesque guignols of Punch and Judy’s dysfunctional household, as well as to the Road Runner and his coyote pursuer, but Blair Thomas and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Water Engine
THE WATER ENGINE Profiles Performance Ensemble at Red Bones Theatre First produced by Chicago’s Saint Nicholas Theater Company in 1977, David Mamet’s The Water Engine is very much a play of its time–dark, cynical, brooding, paranoid, jangling with barely suppressed rage, but also spiritually numb and paralyzed by apathy and vague, unstated fears and disappointments. […]
Posted inFilm
The Filmmaker’s Problem
POVERTIES *** (A must-see) Directed by Laurie Dunphy Years ago, when some friends and I were running a university film society, we had an office where we looked at the films we were about to show and at the films other area film societies were showing. The building janitor sometimes used the office to sleep, […]
Posted inFilm
Family Values and Mass Murder
STAR TIME *** (A must-see) Directed and written by Alexander Cassini With Michael St. Gerard, John P. Ryan, Maureen Teefy, and Thomas Newman. I doubt that any current media buzz term is more ideologically polluted than “family values.” Even its alternative, “suitable for the whole family,” doesn’t contain the same puritanical lies. The egregious false […]